THE COLOR OF ABOLITION

A history of a group of American abolitionists who were roiled by divisiveness.

Despite having a common interest in ending slavery, the abolition movements of mid-19th-century America were hardly unified. As cultural historian Hirshman reveals, race, gender, and class issues incited deep, discomfiting conflicts. She focuses on three central figures: William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the influential newspaper The Liberator; rousing orator and activist Frederick Douglass; and socialite Maria Weston Chapman, who earned the epithet “The Contessa.” “Their alliance,” Hirshman discovered, “fueled critical years of the movement, and their breakup affected the direction of the movement profoundly.” Each was strong-willed and uncompromising: Garrison, whose initial connection to the anti-slavery cause came through his association with Boston Quakers, could be quarrelsome and moralistic. Weston Chapman, by virtue of her social status and wealth, expected to be obeyed. Douglass was an ambitious man who reveled in his celebrity and sought political influence. In the 1830s, the cause of abolition gained force. “From twelve white men in the basement of a Black church, through the efforts of workingmen and women, Black and white, and of dissenting ministers and argumentative college students,” Hirshman writes, “the tendrils of immediate abolitionism began to spread throughout the North.” Less than a decade after its founding in 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society counted some 150,000 members. The Society voiced strong opposition to its rival organization, the American Colonization Society, which proposed to return Black Americans to Africa. Even within the Anti-Slavery Society, factions clashed. Some abolitionists opposed the expansion of slavery; some wanted complete abolition throughout the nation. Some, like Garrison, held that the Constitution allowed for slaveholding; Douglass vehemently disagreed. Viewing the abolitionist movement from a unique angle, Hirshman shows how the breakdown of the alliance among the three activists was fueled in part by Douglass’ rising fame, burgeoning dissent among the nation’s political parties, and, not least, Weston Chapman’s aspersions about Douglass’ work ethic and character.

A well-researched history of the fraught path to emancipation.